He felt suffocated.

In this city, noisy and wild, in his tiny, musty apartment - a cage, to be honest. It seemed that even the air was calculated with precision for everyone: not one gram more, not one gram less, and - what a shame! - he was the one left out. In order to gain a few more days of more or less full existence, he had to run away for a while.

The place he wanted to go to had a heavy scent of wildflowers: honeyed, numbing, and slightly diluted with wild mint. Yunho didn't like such smells. He liked fresh smells like sea or pine, but this was so light and warm that even the overpowering flowers couldn't spoil it. The place was peaceful. It took away the pain for a while, and that stupid mood when all you can do is cry, complain about fate, and put your hands down again and again. Everyone there would have wanted to just lie down on the grass and take a nap for an hour or two while their feelings calmed down.

He got off the highway, walked about two hundred meters across the railroad tracks, and made his way through a small but dense plantation that overlooked the secret place: a small sunny lawn surrounded by tall trees. Yunho had been coming here for years, but he had never seen a single living soul around, as if he were in another world. Laughing or shouting, no one would hear, but the wind would pick up the sounds, ruffling the tall blades of grass, and carry them away to a place far, far away, where no one would ever know your true thoughts and feelings.

At least he wanted to believe that.

Yunho hated his weakness. He hated the way his throat tightened and his eyes burned, the way the walls of the room seemed to grow out of nowhere, shifting and crushing him like a cockroach. How he wanted to snuggle up to his mother and howl in pain.

Yunho had hated being weak for as long as he could remember.

He had been raised to be responsible, serious, and strong. For some reason, his father was absolutely certain that a man could not have any weaknesses, so he kept his son in strictness and stingy love from an early age. The mother, of course, showed more warmth, and even when the parents had a second child, she still didn't forget about her eldest son. Yunho might have realized somewhere inside that this care wasn't enough to keep him warm, but he knew how to be content with little, and his father had even admitted once that he was really proud of him.

His little brother, on the other hand, was a sweet, gentle, and perfectly good-natured child. Maybe his father wasn't so proud of him, but he was compassionate and loving, or maybe his father's only true views on raising real men had ended with Yunho.

And it wasn't even a shame, because his younger brother had never been strong-willed, brave, or even the least bit tough enough to make a "real man" out of him. He just needed protection in the form of a hyung, so Yunho had nothing else to do. Self-pity didn't exist in his life, he didn't even realize that he was tired and sometimes completely exhausted. He simply had no time to take care of his needs. His brother was being bullied at school - you have to deal with his bullies and protect him, his father was away at work - you have to fix the locker door or the broken faucet in the bathroom and then help his mother carry huge bags from the store.

There were times when he wanted to drop everything and run for his life. It only happened a few times, but Yunho pulled himself together without even realizing it - how? - and continued to live the life of a responsible elder son.

Everything changed when he turned seventeen.

That day, Yunho was asked to stay late at school to discuss an upcoming sports competition, and in order not to worry his parents, he decided to call them. But his mother didn't answer. His father didn't answer either. It seemed they were busy at work or had left their phones somewhere, but that day they went to the hospital with his brother - the boy was seriously ill again, and his parents had never missed his calls before. Yunho shrugged his shoulders, but decided not to get upset and went to the meeting. He didn't know that life had taken everything away from him that very day, leaving no room for hope.

The sun was shining brightly, the weather was warm and spring-like. There was no rain or cold wind. As the class president, Yunho was the last one to get off the train. Loaded with extra duties like supervising the preparations for the competition, he walked tiredly home. He tried to call his parents a few times on the way home, but it was in vain.

The house was also empty - Yunho sensed something bad. Everything was like it had never been before. It was as if...

There wasn't enough time to think about it.

He remembered that day vaguely now. He remembered the police knocking on the door, remembered the shaking on the way to the hospital, remembered that his mother was still alive when he arrived... just a few minutes to say goodbye to her, unconscious and disfigured, surrounded by endless tubes and machines. He remembered how he had cried, how he had screamed, how he had torn ligaments, how he had wheezed in the arms of the doctor who sat with him on the floor outside the intensive care unit. He remembered not being shown what was left of his brother and father. He remembered his aunt promising that she wouldn't leave him. Memories of separate flashes remained in his mind, not allowing him to see the full picture of that fateful day. Maybe it was Yunho's mind's way of keeping him from going crazy.

Later, it turned out that it was a drunk driver who swerved into the oncoming lane that took the lives of three people so suddenly. So... senseless. And Yunho often wondered afterwards: What is the motivation of these freaks? How dare they take responsibility not for their own lives, but for the lives of others? How can you just take everything away from him? Not a mother's smile her son's cheek, not his father's stingy but proud praise, not his younger brother's exuberant laughter... nothing. He had nothing left.

After that, Yunho rebuilt himself, gathering the remains of his former self, mining and extracting new ones from what he could find: bits of positive emotions and echoes of hopes and dreams.

But first, he would have a long, painful breakdown, hearing the crunch of his own bones in his ears, but not showing it. He'd wake up, walk to school on his own - whole, on his own two feet - and come home a little more broken than the morning before, until he'd lost himself completely.

He had lost the ability to hate weakness. He held on as long as he could, responding to words like "be strong" or "you have to hang on" with a twisted smile.

He tried, really tried, but nothing held him back.

On the contrary, with each passing day, Yunho became more and more detached from reality, darker and emptier inside, but he tried so hard to hold back the hell that was unfolding inside him....

His father might have said he was doing a good job - he didn't care about his son's mental torment - but Yunho realized he wasn't doing a good job at all when his silent nightly screams into his pillow turned into unrestrained hysterics. He sobbed desperately all night, locked the doors to his temporary room at his aunt's house, and woke up the next morning with red eyes, but suddenly realized that he was feeling a little better. At least he could breathe and visit his family's graves for the first time in two months. He promised to let them go. He apologized to his father for not following his attitudes.

And he would not want to do that from now on.

Since then, Yunho has realized for himself: all the difficulties and sorrows that a person goes through, you just have to live through them and not try to fight with the rolling emotions. On the contrary, feel every shade of pain and despair, let your hands fall and cry if you want to cry. Drown in despair. The pain will not stop, but sooner or later the grief will let go. Life will go on, and you'll want to live.

At least that's what happened to him.

Not that he wanted to live, of course, but the days began to take on a new and familiar rhythm, began to take shape and clarity. The suffocating emptiness became an ordinary, dreary, lonely emptiness, day was replaced by night, and so on, in a circle, without stopping. And when the suffocation returned, Yunho would seek solace in this clearing, surrounded by tall trees and sweet-smelling flowers, just as he was doing now.

The sky was already turning gray when Yunho stretched and got up to go home. The few hours had done him good: his mind was so empty, and he was a little happier than usual, that he walked along the path, whistling the melody of a song he had heard recently.

He didn't want to think about the beginning of a new week and the end of his only day off. He'd been working at a car wash for about three months, and even though the work wasn't physically demanding and the pay was good, he was still exhausted - he needed a break. Even now that he'd left his favorite spot, the crunch of dry twigs underfoot and the wind rattling the leaves above his head acted as a sedative. Calm, quiet, and not a single living... soul.

Oh, no. Not this time.

Damn it...

There was a man sitting on the tracks. Small, scrawny, just a child at first glance - Yunho couldn't pass him by. He was ragged, disheveled from hair to clothes, and deathly pale. An unpleasant shiver ran through his body at the thought: a train should be rushing through here in a few minutes, on schedule.

Sure, he'd heard of stupid teenagers throwing themselves under steel wheels because of unrequited feelings or something, but he'd never met them, even though he often passed by the railroad. It was either curiosity or an innate responsibility for anything that could breathe and move that made him run closer and pull the hapless suicide victim.

The boy turned out to be cute, even handsome, but the absent expression on his face made Yunho grimace and recoil. Something was wrong. In the eyes, or the pose, or the lack of reaction - he didn't know what was more disconcerting. The first impression seemed wrong now. This was hardly an impulsive child with a bad first love experience, maybe there was something else here. Something more serious.

"Hey, get up," Yunho muttered and pulled the dark-haired boy up by both arms, but he was not active and did not resist. "If you wanted to die, you could have chosen a more humane way. Pills or something, I don't know much about that... Where do you live?"

The brunet remained silent, staring at his feet with a blank expression. Maybe he'd had a fight with his parents or something had happened to them.

"You can't jump in front of a train today, I'm sorry, so tell me where to take you," Yunho insisted, bending down to look into his new acquaintance's eyes.  "Hey, are you going to say a word? No? Are you afraid of me? I won't do anything bad, I promise."

There was no answer.

It was getting tense. The growing noise in the distance made it clear that the train was about to pass and there was no time to wait.

"Okay, I don't understand anything... " Yunho rubbed his forehead with the palm of his hand and looked around for help. No one, just that guy standing helplessly by his side. - Well... come with me then? I've never invited anyone into my house before, and I don't keep it clean, so I'm sorry in advance, it's all upside down... Shall we?

*

Yunho's shack smelled hauntingly of the August heat. It was like an apartment on the roof of a two-story building, with tattered walls and antique furniture. Just a small room and a bathroom. Yes, it was... cramped. No hint of domesticity or ordinary comfort, but it was nothing Yunho couldn't afford on his eighteenth birthday. The house he'd grown up in had been rented by his parents for their entire life together, and after their deaths, Yunho had been taken in by his father's sister. As a mother of three, she barely had time to sleep through the turmoil. Yunho felt uncomfortable intruding into the lives of other people's families, dressing and eating at their expense, and when, six months later, he expressed his desire to find a part-time job and rent a room, his aunt's eyes flashed with relief. He was not offended-there was no reason for it. Soon, he packed his few belongings, promised to visit, and left.

Yunho quickly realized that he wouldn't be able to finish high school. For several months, he bounced from one part-time job to another, some paying a pittance, some paying nothing at all and pushing the teenager out the door as soon as the work was done. But he kept looking for acceptable options, even though he had a decent amount of money in his jewelry box that his father was saving for a new car. Yunho couldn't afford to take even a hundred won from there - he wished he knew why.

In the evenings, exhausted and mentally drained, Yunho would fall onto the hard mattress and cover himself with a thin blanket, for lack of a bed. This was how every day of his new, lonely life passed, until a dark-haired wonder, obviously not of this world, crossed the threshold of his house.

There was something really wrong with him.

Something... about everything.

He didn't speak, didn't react, didn't try to do anything on his own like drink water from a glass offered to him or take off his sneakers. But when Yunho left him standing at the table - he just hadn't noticed to sit him down - and started rummaging through the shelves looking for ramyeon, then boiling it and frying the sausages, the stranger sat down himself, apparently tired of standing.

"Hot ramyun in this heat..." Yunho said, looking at him with a puzzled expression. "I don't have anything else, sorry. I'll go to the store tomorrow, I should have the money... By the way, what do you usually eat?"

It's just a question hanging in the air.

"Right, you're not... Ahem... Oh, and one more thing: I'm not a very good cook, so if you don't like something, you better tell me. You know? I could feed you something disgusting and you wouldn't do anything. And I can, you better believe me!"

The boy didn't move, just stared at something, which Yunho, who was slowly getting used to it, didn't even seem to notice.

"Oh, yeah, you can just spit it out. The prank didn't work."

Eventually, the whole situation began to amuse him - who goes out like this to clear their head and relax? He rested so successfully that he somehow dragged along with him a hapless suicide who, on top of everything else, does not know how, or does not want to, or cannot speak, or generally communicate with the world! He was barely older than Yunho himself, maybe his parents were looking for him, but... what if a similar tragedy happened to him like it did to Yunho a year ago? What if there was nowhere to go and no one waiting for him?

Maybe it was naive and stupid to compare his experiences with others, but he couldn't stop it. After all, from the way he looked, one might think that something terrible had happened to him.

But couldn't he have been born that way? What if the guy is sick and they are already looking for him? In that case, the news on the old TV would not have been about the rice growing poorly, but about the search photos.

"Well, what am I supposed to do with you, little monster?" Yunho sighed and looked at his face.

He winced again - this time at the sight of sunken cheeks and a bruised right lower jaw. The bruise was already yellow and not so noticeable, hidden by black hair that reached down to his chin. A small mole under his eye and another one a little lower on his cheekbone gave him a kind of childlike charm, if not for his thinness. Very cute, if strange as hell...

Shyly looking away from his guest, Yunho muttered to himself:

"Anyway, what kind of monster are you? All skin and bones, you look like... a pale toadstool. That's what I'll call you if you don't tell me your name!"

He tried again to observe the stranger's reaction to his childhood provocation, but he remained silent, without raising his eyes or touching the plate of food. Unchanged.

"That's it... You're just like that, aren't you?" Yunho tapped his temple. "Well, not of this world? Or sick? Or what happened? Who can tell you... I'll go crazy too if I keep talking to myself. But if you think like that... does that count? You seem to exist. I'm not talking to myself."

Yunho suddenly laughed, put his metal chopsticks aside with a soft clatter and rubbed his face with his hands.

He sits at a table with a stranger and talks incessantly. He says whatever comes into his head, without filtering a single word, and feels as comfortable as he can in these absurd conditions. Nonsense, just nonsense... And the thoughts that come into his head are completely idiotic.

"Just imagine: if I go crazy and they start looking for me, they'll find both of us. You, out of your head," he pointed at the man and then at himself, "and me, whose mouth doesn't close. The psychiatric hospital is guaranteed, we'll be put in the same ward so it won't be boring. We'll live soul to soul, Toadstool, you'll see...

A little later, as Yunho spread a few thin winter blankets on the floor to make it a little softer and put a new acquaintance to bed, the familiar scent of flowers from a field surrounded by trees suddenly wafted from him.

That night, Yunho, who had settled down next to him, slept peacefully.